Mudflaps and Murder, page 16
part #11 of Witches of Keyhole Lake Series
She placed her hand on her stomach, and the mood swing at the shop and violent chunk-heaving she’d done in the diner parking lot all clicked into place.
“We’re havin’ a baby!” she said, confirming what my brain had just deduced.
My heart expanded about three sizes and I rushed forward. “Oh, my god, Anna Mae! You two! Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
She looked back up at Matt, and they got that mushy look all over again, staring into each other’s eyes. “We don’t want to know,” she said.
I swiped at my cheeks and started to tell her congratulations, but I couldn’t speak around the lump in my throat. Instead, I just pulled them into a hug and squeezed them tight. They were both such wonderful people that had overcome so much. They deserved this.
“Bobbie Sue’s gonna be pissed she missed the announcement,” I said, and Anna Mae waved me off with a flick of her delicate hand. “She’s the one who told me to buy the test and confirm it, already. Apparently, she figured it out after you told her about the meltdown I had, then I got sick at her place last evening when we went in for dinner.”
“Phew,” I said. “You had me scared for a minute.”
I went into the kitchen and poured Anna Mae a glass of tea, then came back in to finish the eggs. Hunter came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me. I twisted around so I was facing him, then swallowed a couple times to get past my nerves. It was now or never, and I pulled in a deep breath, then released it and looked up into those green eyes that I loved and knew so well.
He gave me an Eskimo kiss and grinned at me.
“Listen,” I said, doing my best not to drop my gaze. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
“There is, huh?” he said, laughter dancing across his features.
“Yeah, there is. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a key, then leaned back in the circle of his arms a little so I could hand it to him. He took one arm off my waist and took it.
I’d rehearsed this in my mind all day but could only remember bits and pieces of what I’d planned to say. “I mean, I know you already have a key, but this one’s kinda symbolic. I was wondering if maybe, you know, you might wanna move in with me for good.”
He laughed and touched his forehead to mine. “I’ll do you one better than that.”
He stepped backwards and pulled a battered black-velvet box from his pocket, then dropped to one knee in front of me. “Noelle Flynn, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
I could barely see the ring through the tears, but I did manage to get the one most important word I’d ever said in my life out around the lump in my throat. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes!”
He slipped the ring on my finger, then pulled me in for a kiss.
“I don’t care where we live, whether it’s here, or at my place, or in a refrigerator under the bridge,” he said. “As long as I’m with you, that’ll be my home.”
I swiped a tear off my cheek and grinned at him, then kissed him again.
The moment hung, suspended in time, perfect and beautiful.
The man of my dreams, a family who loved me, and a heart full of joy. Those were my real gifts.
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Thank you so much for reading this installment in my Keyhole Lake series. If you haven’t read Shelby’s new story yet, I’m including the first few pages of it below. If you’d be kind enough to leave a review for Mudflaps and Murder so that others may decide if it may be for them, I’d greatly appreciate it! If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss Book 12 in the Witches of Keyhole Lake series, Murder without Mercy, you can preorder it here!
Happy Reading!
Tegan 😊
Marked by Fate
CHAPTER ONE
I pulled in a couple of deep breaths and swiped a stray tear from my cheek as I cast one last look in my rearview mirror. My whole family and most of our friends stood in the front yard of our farm, watching as I left the only real home I’d ever known and took my first big step into adulthood.
It had been all I could do to keep the tears at bay when I’d hugged my sister, Noelle, goodbye. She’d been holding it together by a thread, though, and if I’d started, she would have fallen apart. Don’t get me wrong—she’s the strongest woman I know, but we’re peas and carrots, and she worries about me. It doesn’t help that we’ve had some pretty messy scrapes with people trying to kill us. When you’re the most powerful witch family in the region, it only stands to reason that somebody’s gonna feel froggy every now and again. Fortunately, we’d beaten the bad guys and come out relatively unscathed, but that didn’t do much to stop Noelle from creating all sorts of terrifying what-ifs in her head about what could happen to me at college.
I am, after all, her baby sister. It doesn’t matter that I’m probably more powerful than she is, or that I have my friend Emma, who’s also pretty handy with her magic, to watch my back. Noelle finished raising me when our Aunt Addy—the one currently hovering, translucent, beside her—had died, and she’d given up her own life to do it.
As I rounded the curve in our winding driveway and my peeps disappeared from view, I sent out a wish to the universe that maybe now that I was off to college, she’d start doing a little living for herself again. She’d earned it.
And I’d stretch my wings and find my place in this world, too. After all, an honest-to-God angel had once told me I was destined for great things.
The thing about that, though, is that Destiny can be a real bitch.
CHAPTER TWO
“What do you mean, there was a mix-up with my room assignment?” I growled at the lady responsible for giving us our dorm room assignments. “We sent in our requests weeks before they were due, and I called to make sure everything was in order. Twice.” I rolled my head on my shoulders, trying to stretch out the kinks from driving for four hours straight. I was hungry, tired, and still a little emotional from leaving my home. Change is stressful even when it’s good, and I was wrung clear out. All I wanted was to get to our room, unpack the bare essentials, and order a pizza, but apparently, Emma was listed on the assignment we’d gotten, but I wasn’t.
The middle-aged woman sitting in front of me typed something into her computer, then clicked a couple times, stopping to run a coral fingernail down the screen as she did so. She shook her head, causing her platinum bob to swing around her face. “I’m sorry, Miss Flynn, but it says right here that you’ve been reassigned.”
Emma shot me an exasperated look and rolled her brown eyes at me as the woman smiled pleasantly up at me as if she just given me a puppy rather than told me they’d screwed up. She clicked to another screen and scrolled down in for a couple of seconds, then glanced back at me, her smile accentuating the fine crow’s feet at the corners of her cornflower eyes. “It seems you’re not in the standard dorms. Due to a lack of space in the dorms, you’ve been assigned to one of the apartment buildings instead. Apartment 434.” She rattled off the name of the building, then gave a vague gesture to the left in what, I assume, was the general direction of the building.
“Apartment buildings?” Em asked. We’d looked at the apartment housing, but it hadn’t been available to us as freshman. Now it seems the tides had turned in our favor. “You mean we have a whole apartment to ourselves?” The glee in her expression was similar to the time a couple Christmases before when we’d filled the fountain in front of our high school with green dye.
“Well,” the woman said, drawing it out as she clicked from one page to another, then back again, “not exactly. It seems Miss Flynn is in a two-bedroom expanded to double occupancy, which means, obviously, that there will be three other girls living there. However, there’s no fourth roommate listed yet. What was your name again?”
“Emma. Emma Payne.”
She shook her head. “No, the only girls listed here are Devin Dark and Breena Kellen, and they’ve both already checked in.”
As the woman went to a homepage and typed in her name, what had begun as a small kernel of irritation was growing into a seedling of concern. Moving so far away from home had been stressful for us both, but knowing we’d be roommates had made it much less scary.
The phone rang for the third time while she was waiting for the page to load, and two linebacker looking guys in line behind us started to grumble.
“Just get your assignments and apply for a change,” the blond refrigerator said, his tone impatient. “The rest of us would like to get our assignments before the semester ends if you don’t mind.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, then turned back to the woman, who was talking on the phone with one finger plugged in her ear to drown us out. She gave me an apologetic smile, then braced the phone against her shoulder and held up one finger to indicate it would only be a minute. My mind whirred. I had no roomie assigned, and she hadn’t gotten a chance to look at Emma’s file yet, or at least I didn’t think she had. I cast a worried glance at Emma, who was chewing on her lip and shifting her weight from one foot to another like she did when she was upset.
That did it. I made a snap decision—a habit I’d been doing my best to temper for the last year. But desperate times called for desperate measures. I pulled out my phone and put it to my ear so it wouldn’t look like I was talking to myself, then uttered a quick spell and shoved a little bit of magical intent into it.
The woman hung up and turned her attention back to the screen just as the warm sensation that always accompanied my magic ebbed. I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping it had worked. I didn’t have the best luck with doing magic on the fly.
Her forehead wrinkled in confusion as she switched to the tab that held my information, then flipped back again. “There seems to be some kind of mistake,” she began.
“Seriously,” the guy behind me snapped, “we have a team meeting in an hour. We’d like to get to our rooms before then.” I cringed when I noticed there were several others in line behind him, and we were getting the stink eye from a few of them, too.
The woman gave me the side-eye as her gaze flickered to the growing line behind us, and I stepped to the side so I could look at the screen. “Oh,” I said, trying to use just the right amount of surprise. “Look, it says in her file that she’s in the same apartment as me. They must have just forgotten to link us or something.”
That sounded like a crock even to my ears, but the woman glanced from me to the impatient goons behind me, then to Emma.
“So it seems,” she said with a smile so stiff I was afraid her face was gonna crack. “Apparently, Miss Payne, you’re Miss Flynn’s roommate after all.”
I gave a mental happy dance, both that I’d done the spell correctly and that Emma and I were roommates once again.
“Thank you,” I said as she pulled a set of keys from a locked box on the wall behind her.
She thrust them at me, then gave Emma the fakest apologetic look I’d ever seen. “I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to have any keys for you, Ms. Payne. Check back tomorrow.”
She gave me one final, weighted glance as the muscle heads behind us started to get restless. “And Ms. Flynn? You’d do well to remember that survivors learn to play the cards they’re dealt. Manipulating reality to suit yourself is rarely an option in real life.”
Before I could formulate a response, she’d turned her attention to the guys, dismissing us.
“Well that was weird,” Emma said once we were out of earshot. “Did you do something? I thought I felt a whisper of magic while she was on the phone.”
“I did. But just a little. It was no big deal. It’s not like I had a roommate already.” A little niggle of doubt worked through me as I said that, though. That level of arrogance had gotten me into serious trouble once. So serious that had it not been for angelic intervention, I wouldn’t have made it through to tell the tale. I pushed the thought aside, though. It was spilt milk.
The heat smacked us in the face as we left the comfort of the air-conditioned building, and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t put more serious consideration into the school in upstate Washington that had accepted me. Anybody who chose to stay in a place so hot and humid that you practically needed a scuba tank to breathe needed their head examined. Then I remembered I felt the same way about snow but to a much greater degree.
“This place is massive,” I said, referring to a map that had come in our welcome packets. I stepped into the shade of a giant oak and unfolded it.
“Okay,” Emma said, pointing at the map. “We’re here, and our apartment’s there.”
I groaned; it was all the way on the other side of campus. “Let’s just go and get it over with,” I said, climbing into my car. “Please tell me you don’t feel like going out to explore tonight, though.”
She shook her head. “Not even a little. I have to call Mom to let her know we made it, then I’m ready to chill. I’m dreading just hauling our stuff up.”
My phone dinged with an incoming text and I glanced at my phone. Cody, my boyfriend of two years, was letting me know he was all checked in, but that his advisor wanted to talk to him. Since he’d ridden his motorcycle, all his stuff was in my car. I texted back to let him know about the change in plans and told him to meet us at our place when he was done.
“I guess that’s one of the benefits of the apartment,” Emma said, reading something in a pamphlet the registrar lady had given us. “They’re co-ed, so Cody will be able to visit whenever he wants.”
“Bonus, then,” I said. “Now if we wanna do a binge session of Supernatural, we can, without watching the clock.” We’d reached the parking lot where we’d parked, and just looking at the full load it was carrying made me tired.
“I’ll follow you,” she said, climbing into her own car. I laughed when she pushed her giant stuffed Pikachu out of the way. Her car was packed tight. Unlike me, Emma was not a light packer, and I was pretty sure she’d brought close to everything she owned with her. I had two suitcases and a couple boxes of stuff, plus my laptop and tablet, of course. The smile fell off my face when I realized how many trips it was going to take us to carry all of that stuff up. As tired as I was, I saw a little witchy business in our immediate future. We couldn’t leave it in her car, but I was pretty sure I’d die if I had to make too many trips, especially if our apartment was twenty miles from the parking lot and up ten flights of stairs.
I backed carefully out of my parking space and waited for Em to get behind me, then guided us toward our new home away from home.
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Tegan Maher, Mudflaps and Murder
